I watched this and the film is legitimately horrendous. Let me try to adequately capture it.

Ryan Reynolds is an NPC that gains sentience (the game looks nothing like any videogame ever created) and there's a montage of him leveling up after he gains sunglasses that let you see the mission markers and shit. Lot of weird Millennial nostalgia -- Wrecking Ball plays while he jumps on to a wrecking ball, lot of weird rap music, no Gangnam Style. Taiki Waititi plays the IRL megalomaniac in charge of the game and has the brilliant business idea to shut down Free City 1 when Free City 2 is released.

The guy from Stranger Things plays a pretentious coder type who's our ostensible hero and talks about his "original code" hidden away in Free City. He's friends with another coder lady that believes Taiki stole their original game idea which was going to be epic, before the dark forces of not-Activision stole it away. Anyway, the coder lady later fucks the NPC, a sentient AI created by the male coder, which is a level of cuckolding I don't really wanna handle right now.

Eventually they're trying to find the original code stashed away in the build. I think they find out because Ryan Reynolds' NPC apartment blinds have reflection textures of the old world and not the new one. There's several jokes of streamers. JackSepticEye, Pokimane, Ninja make numerous cameos and there's a ton of "holy shit, the new Free Guy trend is sweeping the MMO nation!" stream/react videos. One of the jokes is that a 22y/o guy is a loser for living with his parents. nervously laughs

Anyway, eventually they have to reach Developer Island, which is where the old game world is hidden, and that'll prove Taiki is a thief or whatever. At one point Reynolds gives a rousing speech that incites the NPCs to go on a general strike. Given they already rebooted the game once and wiped Ryan Reynolds' memory (which was brought back when the lady coder kissed him again), I don't get why they don't just do that again. Also, every single game thing is inaccurate, obviously -- it says "SERVER BUFFERING" when people try to reconnect instead of whatever that Blizzard Error is everyone gets on launch night, the level of control is beyond any even-VR game, etc.

While they try to make it to Dev Island (which is out of normal game bounds), there's a car chase scene while the game rapidly collapses around them. Note that the conceit of this film is that the IRL evil devs don't actually have a way to ban NPCs, delete his car, or basically do anything, really. Good Guy Coder is taken away by security but surreptitiously adds ramps into the game to help them get away. Reynolds gets to the beach and this scene occurs as the server disconnects all players and the lady coder fades away like she's been snapped by Thanos.

Also, at one point, coder guy sends the lady coder a traceback log of code. It looks like a flowchart of a loop and not actual code. The text messages don't even use a real UI.

Enraged by the above, presumably, Taiki starts taking a fire-axe to the game's servers. This causes pieces of the game world to disappear. I think to myself: motherfucker it doesn't work like that! Especially because you're using AWS or Azure! Anyway, Reynolds gets to dev island and there's the old world, which has literal dinosaurs and shit walking around in the garden of Eden. It looks way shittier than a game where you can shoot people and rob banks, but this is from developers who said "we want games where you talk to people and not kill them".

Also, while I'm not one to get too bothered by it, there's name-dropping of "one of the NPCs just wrote a manifesto against heterosexist patriarchy" and "he's the only non-toxic guy I've ever kissed" and shit like that. The programmers also don't look like, well, what I assume programmers look like, primarily because the coder guy has no anime stickers on his laptop and one of the black ladies wears a huge sweatshirt that says "QUEER". If they actually cared about gay people they wouldn't have forced a straight romance into this abomination.

Anyway, the original coders get the game back or whatever, Reynolds is free to do what he wants (in the game) and the coder guy asks the coder lady out. It has already been slated for a sequel and made $300mil, with an 80% on RT and 94% audience rating.

"...And then he pulls out a lightsaber!"

"Love it!"

"And then somebody's all like, "Is that a lightsaber," and somebody else is like, "Hell yeah that's a lightsaber!"

"That's perfect!"

"And then the bad guy is all like, "Is that a lightsaber?" and somebody's like, "Uh, sir, we believe it may in fact be a lightsaber."

"Keep going, you're on fire!"

"Well, uh, I guess he just swings the lightsaber around a bit but it doesn't really do much so he switches to like a club with like a horse head or something idk."

snorts another line of coke "Fuck yeah let's fucking do this shit :lets-fucking-go: "

Jesus fucking christ my eyes.

Did they actually hire streamers to be in this movie??

In communism fiction should only be allowed to reference something that only a maximum of 1000 people know

This was probably the best scene in the entire movie.

:what-the-hell:

btw I love how an unpaid advertisement for a disney movie has been ironically upvoted to the front page of a violence posting commie website lol

It took me too long to realize the reactions where not edited in. I have only seen 2 minutes and I hate it already.

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1:15-1:25 is how lightsabers feel in every Star Wars game except the Jedi Knight series.

At least Fallen Order was a bit better in this regard.

All the IP you love blended up into the cultural equivalent of the nutraloaf they feed prisoners

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You weren't even kidding, wow. This may be the worst thing I've ever seen.

Honestly, until the lightsaber I thought it was, well, not good but kinda charming. Chris Evans reacting to the shield was fun and I just find Matty Cardarople playing the cliché nerd every time funny.

But holy shit they really had to play the star wars theme and say "omg lightsaber* not once, not twice, but three fucking times. Also Ninja was in the scene for less than half a second and somehow still managed to mess his part up, boy does he seem like a garbage actor.

If you completely turn your brain off it's probably somewhat fun to watch, but wow this looks more egregious than Ready Player One indeed. Literally just "HEY REMEMBER THE THING FROM THE MOVIE?".

As someone who has played Marvels Avengers - Caps shield is fucking worthless against big hits, and Hulk punches are weak.

But as someone who has played Star Wars games, that lightsaber does accurate damage.

The better question is how these Disney items got into the game and how the bad guy CEO should be pivoting his fear of finding out he “stole the game” (if the game was made in off hours by employees, the company tends to own it) and instead should be shitting his pants that Disney will sue him for copyright infringement.

you can tell critics were paid off for reviews because they loved this but hated Gamer which is essentially the same thing except moody and has a better scene where Gerald Butler fuels a car with his piss